"None of them was willing to be a girl," he said. "You can see why not."
"I know, right? I don't blame them," she said with a hard edge to her voice. "Being a girl is the pits, trust me."

With boys there was a fundamental assumption that they had a right to be there—not always, but more often than not. With girls, Why her? came up so quickly.

I don't get it, Laura said. How come boys can do whatever they feel like and girls can't? Because they're boys, Lucy cried. Boys have done whatever they've felt like since the beginning of time, don't you even know that? Haven't you ever learned that yet, you poor, ignorant little - how smart do you have to be to know a thing like that? They're irresponsible and self-indulgent and careless and cruel, and they get away with it all their lives because they're boys.

First and foremost, girls are survivors. We are trained to expect the world to be toxic to us and make the best of a bad situation by developing the skills to survive it. No one ever says the skills won’t be toxic. No one ever mentions how we are cruel sometimes and we don’t choose it.

the world is hard on ambitious girls

Girls had a very difficult life, especially those who chose to go to school. I recall some of her schoolmates dropping out just because the boys ordered them to do so. In my twilight years, I expressed disappointment that female liberation veterans were never accorded the same recognition as their male counterparts.

All the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class included all the girls in the world except her, and they had all the usual human feelings and were very ordinary girls; while the other class -herself alone- had no weaknesses and was superior to all humanity.

Girls say to me, very reasonably, 'why isn't it a bunch of girls? Why did you write this about a bunch of boys?' Well, my reply is I was once a little boy - I have been a brother, a father, I am going to be a grandfather. I have never been a sister, or a mother, or a grandmother. That's one answer. Another answer is of course to say that if you - as it were - scaled down human beings, scaled down society, if you land with a group of little boys, they are more ike a scaled-down version of society than a group of little girls would be. Don't ask me why, and this is a terrible thing to say because I'm going to be chased from hell to breakfast by all the women who talk about equality - this is nothing to do with equality at all. I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been. But one thing you can't do with them is take a bunch of them and boil them down, so to speak, into a set of little girls who would then become a kind of image of civilisation, of society. The other thing is - why aren't they little boys AND little girls? Well, if they'd been little boys and little girls, we being who we are, sex would have raised its lovely head, and I didn't want this to be about sex. Sex is too trivial a thing to get in with a story like this, which was about the problem of evil and the problem of how people are to live together in a society, not just as lovers or man and wife.

They were not unfortunate girls who, as outcasts or in the belief that they were cast out by society, grieved wholesomely and intensely and, once in a while at times when the heart was too full, ventilated it in hate or forgiveness. No visible change took place in them; they lived in the accustomed context, were respected as always, and yet they were changed, almost unaccountably to themselves and incomprehensibly to others. Their lives were not cracked or broken, as others' were, but were bent into themselves; lost to others, they futilely sought to find themselves.

Girls are weighed down by restrictions, boys with demands - two equally harmful disciplines.

In visiting the public school in London a few years since, I noticed that the boys were employed in linear drawing, and instructed upon the black-board in the higher branches of arithmetic and mathematics; while the girls, after a short exercise in the mere elements of arithmetic, were seated during the bright hours of the morning, stitching wristbands. I asked why there should be this difference made; why the girls too should not have the black-board? The answer was, that they would not probably fill any station in society requiring such knowledge. The demand for a more extended education will not cease until girls and boys have equal instruction in all the departments of useful knowledge.

You take girls, for example. They're copying their moms and magazines and everything to know how to act around guys. I mean it's not like in movies where girls like assholes or anything like that. It's not that easy. They just like somebody that can give them purpose.

Boys are suffering, in the modern world. They are more disobedient — negatively — or more independent — positively — than girls, and they suffer for this, throughout their pre-university educational career. They are less agreeable (agreeableness being a personality trait associated with compassion, empathy and avoidance of conflict) and less susceptible to anxiety and depression,172 at least after both sexes hit puberty.173 Boys’ interests tilt towards things; girls’ interests tilt towards people.174 Strikingly, these differences, strongly influenced by biological factors, are most pronounced in the Scandinavian societies where gender-equality has been pushed hardest: this is the opposite of what would be expected by those who insist, ever more loudly, that gender is a social construct. It isn’t. This isn’t a debate. The data are in.

Boys will be boys—And even that ... wouldn't matter if only we could prevent girls from being girls.